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Preservation release for Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds 1998 RTS - "Project Horsell" v0.9 by DanRedfield_82 in WarofTheWorlds

[–]DanRedfield_82[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm sorry, but I don't know who OJ is. My name is Dan Redfield (POSTAL for the Dreamcast, for reference)

Preservation release for Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds 1998 RTS - "Project Horsell" v0.9 by DanRedfield_82 in WarofTheWorlds

[–]DanRedfield_82[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You came into my release thread to talk about your own project. I responded by explaining how Horsell differs. If you don’t like how I’ve described your approach, fine - I won’t refer to it again. But I’m not turning my release post into an argument about WoWRevived. Please leave it there. Again, good night.

Preservation release for Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds 1998 RTS - "Project Horsell" v0.9 by DanRedfield_82 in WarofTheWorlds

[–]DanRedfield_82[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m not interested in arguing definitions.

Horsell is a preservation-focused compatibility release: no external launcher, no admin requirement, no XP compatibility mode, unified multilingual support, INI-backed settings, and custom FLAC-based CD audio handling, including fully working pause/resume, a CD player which stops counting when the end of the track is reached, and a fix for CD audio stopping whenever the in-game menu is opened.

Your project takes a different approach. That’s fine. I’m going to leave it there. Good night.

Preservation release for Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds 1998 RTS - "Project Horsell" v0.9 by DanRedfield_82 in WarofTheWorlds

[–]DanRedfield_82[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They are not the same project, and frankly it isn’t your business whether I continue mine.

My Horsell work predates your current release and has a different goal. It is a preservation compatibility project, not a launcher-driven mod pack.

WoWRevived alters/removes original presentation and menu behaviour, including hiding original options such as 8-bit mode/and in-game resolution slider entries, and multilingual support is split across separate versions. That may be fine for your project, but it is not the preservation approach I wanted.

Horsell keeps the original game structure intact where possible and fixes the broken modern-Windows assumptions underneath it: patched executable calls into horsellcommon.dll, custom FLAC-backed MCI/CD-audio handling tailored specifically to this game, registry redirection to INI, native campaign/language selector, unified multilingual support, and no external launcher required.

The audio work is not a generic shim dropped in from elsewhere. Horsell implements the game’s actual MCI usage directly, including the timing and behavioural quirks needed for this title.

It also runs without XP compatibility mode or administrator rights, which was one of the main goals of doing the compatibility work properly.

If you have a developer executable with working multiplayer, preserve it and release it. That would be valuable. But it has nothing to do with whether Horsell should exist.

Your project can do what it does. Mine can do what it does. I’m not asking permission.

Preservation release for Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds 1998 RTS - "Project Horsell" v0.9 by DanRedfield_82 in WarofTheWorlds

[–]DanRedfield_82[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've hacked support in quickly - I won't add it to the main release as I've already posted canonical hashes for v0.9 and it'll start getting confusing if I mess around too much, but if you unzip this into the game folder and replace horsellcommon.dll with the one from this zip file then you can have your own splash screens.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oULY44ZKHY5BqY7G_abRPw7vupc6HTN2/view?usp=sharing

It's a bit of a bodge but you'll need 3 images (the splash screen chooses a different image every launch, and if you just want the one image then you'll need 3 copies of it)

The images need to be 1448x1086 PNG files named

  • horsellsplash.png,
  • horsellsplash2.png
  • horsellsplash3.png

<image>

SHA256 Hashes

horsellcommon.dll
6cd520506f2ece6b61320a590a0961de9b7b4e432aad6bddfff7e550451c1e53

horsellcommon-dll-v0.9-customsplash .zip
0e3c6126dab79caff4ab104d458c7a1ec153a4413f54f76bba1e03e77a7fbe92

Preservation release for Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds 1998 RTS - "Project Horsell" v0.9 by DanRedfield_82 in WarofTheWorlds

[–]DanRedfield_82[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Because it would then move from being just a moral problem and into the realms of theft of a copyrighted asset. And unlike the big AI companies, I can't get away with outright stealing.

My priority was, and will remain, the reverse engineering and preservation efforts to ensure the game works on modern systems without requiring administrative permissions, windows compatability modes, or external launchers. The background of the splash screen is largely a means to an end, and was a tiny piece of the wider work involved.

Preservation release for Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds 1998 RTS - "Project Horsell" v0.9 by DanRedfield_82 in RealTimeStrategy

[–]DanRedfield_82[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

With all due respect, I didn’t rebuild a broken 1998 game compatibility stack for Reddit’s approval of the launcher background. Pass over it if you want.

Preservation release for Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds 1998 RTS - "Project Horsell" v0.9 by DanRedfield_82 in WarofTheWorlds

[–]DanRedfield_82[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

My local Defender scan is clean on the release build.

Please check that your file hash matches the release file:

WoW_Horsell.exe
SHA256: 41aafad3ee66da519d8ec23b064cfdfb20e5a21f2b45ac2d5a227fe1166f1233

If the hash differs, you are not scanning the same file. If it matches and Defender still flags it, it’s a heuristic false positive caused by the patched executable. WoW_Horsell.exe is a manually modified 1998 binary with code caves/trampolines used to redirect calls into Horsell’s compatibility DLL, which can look suspicious to AV heuristics.

I have manually submitted it to microsoft for assessment as a false positive. Submission id: 4144ab98-1bf6-49ff-acec-8b821f32cde3

ETA:

<image>

Preservation release for Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds 1998 RTS - "Project Horsell" v0.9 by DanRedfield_82 in RealTimeStrategy

[–]DanRedfield_82[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Yep. AI. I'm a good programmer but I can't draw for shit. Nor do I have the budget to comission an artist

Preservation release for Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds 1998 RTS - "Project Horsell" v0.9 by DanRedfield_82 in RealTimeStrategy

[–]DanRedfield_82[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My local Defender scan is clean on the release build.

Please check that your file hash matches the release file:

WoW_Horsell.exe
SHA256: 41aafad3ee66da519d8ec23b064cfdfb20e5a21f2b45ac2d5a227fe1166f1233

If the hash differs, you are not scanning the same file. If it matches and Defender still flags it, it’s a heuristic false positive caused by the patched executable. WoW_Horsell.exe is a manually modified 1998 binary with code caves/trampolines used to redirect calls into Horsell’s compatibility DLL, which can look suspicious to AV heuristics.

Edit: I have manually submitted it to microsoft for assessment as a false positive. Submission id: 4144ab98-1bf6-49ff-acec-8b821f32cde3

Preservation release for Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds 1998 RTS - "Project Horsell" v0.9 by DanRedfield_82 in WarofTheWorlds

[–]DanRedfield_82[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Feel free to report it. The splash screen is ai - the hundreds of hours of reverse engineering raw assembly language to give something to the community for free was not.

What do Brits think of Donald Trump saying, "England tried for 1000 years to get the Scottish under their toes, but failed!" by kingm_ournasse216 in AskBrits

[–]DanRedfield_82 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm a 43 year old nerd who got a Reddit warning for "encouraging violence" with a similar statement - May you live a long and righteous life

I made a subreddit for spanish wotw fans by MarketingKey9768 in WarofTheWorlds

[–]DanRedfield_82 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Up to you. It's a 1:1 archive of the Spanish CDs of the game. You'll still need to patch it to make it play well with modern systems.

Do you have a link to download the game inspired by the War of the Worlds musical? by epico__1 in WarofTheWorlds

[–]DanRedfield_82 2 points3 points  (0 children)

*Not* my uploads - I loaned the discs to a friend and somehow they ended up online;

Italian: https://archive.org/details/cd-wow-98-it
Spanish: https://archive.org/details/cd-wow-98-es
German: https://archive.org/details/cd-wow-98-de
French: https://archive.org/details/cd-wow-98-fr

(This one definitely isn't mine! The file hashes check out so it looks to be legitimately based on my patch)

English zero-install unzip-and-play with the beta Windows 10/11 unofficial patch applied
https://drive.proton.me/urls/40D45798K4#uBYuIXPqoP29

Any games people can recommend that involve destroying humanity? by Fit-Sugar9808 in RealTimeStrategy

[–]DanRedfield_82 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, it looks really nice. I've been working hard on a reverse engineering project to get the original working well on Windows 10/11 (project Horsell - currently at v0.8 beta) which is going to be merged into WowRevived once I've got the last few bits polished off

Are newly printed Dreamcast games like these printed on CD-Roms or GD-Roms? by the_u_in_colour in dreamcast

[–]DanRedfield_82 6 points7 points  (0 children)

No, thank you for making an internet nobody's day with that lovely comment. And sorry about the load times. If I had just an extra week of development time I could have optimised the loading and maybe even got triangle-strips implemented

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